Digging deeper

When revealing information, a player draws a puzzle piece from the pile that his hero marker is adjacent to. However, if he wishes to reveal more valuable pieces of the puzzle (which are more likely to offer extra benefits for the detective), he must either wait until the least valuable pile of puzzle pieces is exhausted (which advances all of the hero markers up to the next-most valuable pile), or he must dig deeper.

Upon digging deeper, the player advances his hero marker so it is next to the next-most valuable pile of puzzle pieces. For example, a player whose hero marker was next to the shift piece pile could dig deeper to move his hero marker to be next to the favor piece pile. Obviously, this has no effect if the player's hero marker is already next to the most valuable pile of puzzle pieces, the baggage piece pile.

Tip: Digging deeper is useful for gaining powerful puzzle pieces and benefits early in the game, but it comes at a cost. Since a player's hero marker resets to the least valuable pile of puzzle pieces every time he reveals information, this effectively makes a favor piece cost the same amount of effort as placing two shift pieces at the start of the game, while a baggage piece costs as much effort as three shift pieces. Sometimes it's better to wait until the shift pieces are exhausted before going after the more powerful pieces.

In the diagram below, Louis spends 1 Time to dig deeper and moves his hero marker from the shift pieces to the favor pieces. If there had been no favor pieces left, he would have jumped directly to the baggage pieces.

For example, in the diagram below, there is one link to Human First (along the yellow line), while there are two links to Jinteki) along the green and red paths).